Success Story: SF Sketchfest: The San Francisco Comedy Festival

StreamSend has been a supporter and the email solution provider of choice for SF Sketchfest for most of its ten-year run, helping the festival build awareness and reach its audience of comic fans.

SF Sketchfest is a nationally renowned comedy festival founded in 2002 by Bay Area actor-comedians David Owen, Janet Varney and Cole Stratton. The festival takes place every January for several weeks in a variety of San Francisco venues and features sketch, improv, stand-up, film and special tributes and panels. Recent performers have included both emerging stand-up talent and comic actors from shows such Saturday Night Live and Kids in the Hall, and top names like James L. Brooks, Garry Shandling, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman, Dan Aykroyd, Neil Patrick Harris and Fred Willard.

As a grassroots event, SF Sketchfest showcases live comedy, but needs to take marketing seriously, so most attention to that effort has been staying in touch with comedy fans and keeping them up on the festival and other events year round. Early on, the directors saw the value of using email to reach those fans and started by doing it themselves. But as the numbers grew, so did the hassles of maintaining email lists and mailings and keeping the operation running smoothly. They searched for an easy-to-use, effective solution and found StreamSend.

We lived up to our reputation and have helped email marketing become the festival’s most consistently successful communications tool, now reaching over twelve thousand fans with a variety of newsletters and show alerts year round. Helping festival directors handle the challenges of email campaigns on all fronts, StreamSend supplies them with clear, detailed response and delivery analysis, helping guide future mailings and maximizing delivery rates.

David Owen, co-festival director summed up his experience with us:

“StreamSend makes it easy for us; it’s a great marketing tool. Using just StreamSend and social media – no print, radio or TV – we can sell out shows of more than a thousand people. It’s that effective.”